Rise up, rise up, America! Let us unify around our shared national passion for… building permits?!?

I boast neither great expertise in permitting processes nor ambition to gain it. Foolhardily enough, I’m here to propose some solutions anyway, because Lots to Gain is ultimately a process newsletter, and we don’t want to let bad processes sully the good name of healthy processes.

Besides, polls place permitting among the most important issues to Americans today. Well, they don’t say that exactly, but they kind of imply it. What they actually say is that the economy is, as usual, at or near the top of the most-import-issues list (though recent polls have put this newsletter’s sweet-spot concerns about government leadership and corruption even higher). Among economic concerns the top spot reliably belongs to the cost of living, or, to use the political buzzword of the day, affordability.

Affordability, in turn, is inseparable from housing, comfortably the largest line item in most family budgets. The largest cost of living is the cost of the thing you’re living in. And today housing cost means housing supply. To lower the costs of housing, says a growing econ-101-wielding political consensus, we have to build more of it. But building more of it is slow and expensive, in no small part because of the complexities of permitting processes. So, whether we know it or not, all of this makes permitting processes among the most important issues to Americans today.

Moreover, if you subscribe to the housing theory of everything, housing is practically all of the most important issues of the day: productivity, innovation, obesity, climate change, inequality... even fertility. The arguments are worth attention, but you don’t have to buy the everything theory to agree with our basic premise here: housing supply is kind of a big deal.

Similarly, you can be wary of unfettered growth and still acknowledge that permitting processes have metastasized into a cancerous growth themselves. More and more voices on the political left – typically the process-happy aisle – are decrying America’s inability to build much of anything. This includes projects the left tends to love: affordable housing, transit lines, renewable energy infrastructure, etc. Leading the left-leaning voices, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have called for abundance politics, seeking to inspire a capital-D Democratic vision of an America that thrives by lowering boundaries to building.

Pushback to the abundance agenda comes mostly from the farther left, whom the word deregulation tends to rankle. They don’t want to abandon hard-fought legislative wins in environmental conservation, historical preservation, and neighborhood input. (They also look askance at any left-leaning political agenda not centered on, well, lefty things: inequality, environmental protections, labor rights, housing justice, etc.)

The discussion to date has mostly been a tug-a-war along these lines: regulation vs deregulation, more process vs. less. But there’s a lot more potential in stepping out of the conventional political frame and instead rethinking the kinds of processes we use to decide what and where and when to build.

Civic Assemblies

Returning readers know this newsletter advocates for using rabbles, our preferred if not-yet-widely-adopted term for civic assemblies, to address major challenges in America. The basic idea is that ordinary citizens selected by democratic lotteries convene, learn from experts, take part in facilitated deliberations, and reach decisions together.

Today I’ll propose two ways rabbles could help with the housing crisis and thus the affordability crisis and – if you buy the everything theory – practically everything else.

The first is a very conventional rabble application: we could hold state-wide civic assemblies charged with reviewing and suggesting changes to permitting processes.

Civic assemblies do not suffer from the afflictions that keep conventional politicians from addressing the housing crisis effectively. They judge solutions based on evidence, not on resonance with party messaging. They do not worry constantly that others will take credit for and politically benefit from policy changes. They concern themselves with the substance of the rules they’re proposing, not whether they are labeled with effective soundbites. They listen to each other. They weigh in together. They weigh together. They try to find a way up together.

Due to the complexity of the issues involved – arcane rules, multiple jurisdictions, many competing interests – these would need to be comparatively large and long-term assemblies with extensive access to experts. And, to make the participants’ efforts worthwhile, relevant authorities should commit beforehand to giving great weight to any resulting proposals.

Taking part in such an assembly would be a challenging job, but the evidence suggests ordinary people are up to it. Rabbles have been deployed to great effect across the globe, tackling complex issues like homelessness, climate change, Covid-19 response, urban planning, energy transition, AI, election reform, abortion, same-sex marriage, and many more. Without the deliberation-poisoning influence of elections, these assemblies have proven remarkably effective at succeeding where politicians fail by doing very non-politician things: listening, learning, reading, asking earnest questions, deliberating earnestly, and seeking common ground.

I began this essay by noting that I had no ambition to plunder the depths of permitting processes. As a voter, I don’t. I don’t want to dig into a bunch of bureaucratic gobbledygook knowing that even if I learned something that changed my vote, my vote wouldn’t change anything. But as a deliberator in a civic assembly, I’d be eager to dive in, because my effort would matter. In this way, I’m a pretty typical citizen: most of us are willing to devote time and thought and energy to civic contributions when we think it will actually make a difference. That’s why we’re so much wiser when we deliberate than when we vote.

I have no idea, of course, what a civic assembly would conclude about permitting processes, but I have great confidence that it would generate thoughtful proposals based on deep consideration by a body more representative of its public than any election could ever muster. Over and over again, that’s what we see from citizen deliberators; they do the work. No grandstanding, no partisan chicanery, just problem solving.

Civic Permitting Boards

So my first proposal is a one-off advisory state-wide rabble. And I hope such a rabble would consider the second proposal: civic permitting boards.

Unlike the one-off assemblies, these boards would be permanent local or regional bodies with rotating members. And they would have genuine authority over permitting decisions, not just advisory power like the state assemblies. Specifically, they would be empowered to expedite projects where they deem environmental and community risks low and potential rewards high. Or, conversely, to delay projects where risks are high relative to rewards.

“Noooo, not more process,” many reasonable folks will object. Indeed, if such a design led to more process overall, it would be a great failure. But there is reason to believe such boards could help reduce the total process burden considerably.

A great weakness of the current process design is that it is biased in favor of anyone who might want to slow anything down, regardless of their intent. Often this leads to the triumph of private interests over public interests. Oil companies can leverage environmental impact statements to delay the development of competing projects, including renewable energy. A few NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) opponents can bog down projects enormously beneficial to the broader community. As a result, the system leans lethargyward. No hare goes untortoised.

But the opposite solution – letting everything through without review – would also mean private interests trump public ones. Private builders could create whatever they want regardless of potential negative public impacts.

So how can we speed things up without screwing things up? The challenge is to distinguish between projects where there are legitimate public concerns and those where biased private parties are using process levers to slow up schedules, drive up expenses, and generally muck up the works. Making this delicate distinction is not an appointed bureaucrat’s job; it requires nuanced, subjective judgment calls and thus deep democratic legitimacy. But elected legislatures would be terrible at the job, too; they are too conflicted, too partisan, too susceptible to corruption, and too busy with other things. The conventional political answers won’t work.

Civic assemblies address all these problems. They derive legitimacy from genuine descriptive representation - they think, feel, reason, and act like the public. These assemblies are, in fact, mini-publics. And they can guard against corruption by following the example of another form of mini-public: court juries. As with juries, you can disallow conflict-of-interest interactions. You can’t prohibit elected officials from talking privately with constituents; you can prohibit rabble members from talking privately with permit seekers; all interactions between assemblies and applicants can and should be public. And, because lotteries are so much easier to run than elections, you can scale as needed to make sure the boards have the resources needed to review processes expediently.

The essence of the idea is that continuously operating civic permitting boards would get a first quick crack at all development proposals. The submitters would argue their case for expedition. A citizen-board-hired attorney could offer counterarguments. Then the members, all of whom will have undergone a training phase so that they are aware of the values and costs of each review phase, will deliberate briefly and come to a decision about whether the project merits any unusual treatment.

A typical permitting process should be considerably faster and smoother than what we have today. The current baseline is odiously byzantine. Success says less about a project’s merit and more about its capacity to navigate bureaucracy. We need a better way.

We still want nuance. We should be able to expedite construction projects with clear public urgency and value. And, when necessary, we should still be able to slow things down. Determining which projects fall into which category wisely and fairly requires a level of thoughtfulness and representation beyond what bureaucrats or elected bodies can offer. We don’t need to scrap all review processes, we just need processes that actually align with the public interest.

This proposal is very much a rough sketch, but it outlines a necessary dynamic: each state needs both a one-time broad system update and new ongoing democratic review mechanisms. Both are best served by lot-selected assemblies. The upshot is that we can actually infuse the system with more democracy while making it more effective.

This isn’t about building to build, it’s about empowering ourselves to solve real problems. As long as anyone can grind a project they don’t like to a halt, we’ll never address our housing crisis. Or build new transit lines. Or much of anything that involves dreaming big together. The political left and right don’t need to converge on unchecked free-market solutions for all of this to work. We don’t have to give up on environmental and social protections. But we do have to be thoughtful about how to make them fair and efficient.

Rabbles to the rescue.